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Located off Al-Amin Street in the old Jewish Quarter, Beit Farhi is the real power center in Old Damascus.
(Tim Beddow)

In Damascus, Restoring Beit Farhi and the City’s Jewish Past

An architect works to restore the grand palace of Raphael Farhi, one of the most powerful men in the Ottoman world

By
Stephen Glain

smithsonian.com
June 10, 2009

Ghosts inhabit Damascus’ Old City like players on a stage. You can see them peering through the ramparts of the citadel and tending to the faithful at the Omayyad Mosque. In the narrow passageways of the main souk, they clamor among the spice markets and connive between the caravansary and Byzantine colonnade.

From This Story

Noted biblical scholar John Wilson wrote the Beit Farhi is "a little like a village...[with] sixty or seventy souls. The roof and walls of the rooms around the court are gorgeous to a high degree."
(Tim Beddow)

Located off Al-Amin Street in the old Jewish Quarter, Beit Farhi is the real power center in Old Damascus.
(Tim Beddow)

Architect Hakam Roukbti and his wife Shirley Dijksma only had one visual source that depicted Beit Farhi at its apex: an 1873 rendering of the palace's main courtyard by the classicist painter Sir Frederick Leighton.
(Tim Beddow)

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You can see them. There is the Ottoman Governor As’ad Pasha al-Azem, receiving visitors and hearing petitions in the salamlik of his palace, a Mamlukian treasure. Across the way is a merchant from Andalusia offering textiles from Pisa for a set of Persian ceramics. At the Burmistan al Nur, or “house of patients,” a group of surgeons are gathered under a kumquat tree for a lecture on the latest techniques of scapulimancy – a method of divination – from Toledo, Spain. And here among litter of citrus fruit, chatting among shop owners and munching on Arab pastry, is the cunning and charismatic Mu’awiya – the caliph himself – so secure in his authority he is attended by only a single bodyguard.

But the real power center in Old Damascus – indeed, in the whole empire – is a few hundred yards away, off Al-Amin Street in the old Jewish Quarter. That would be Beit Farhi, the grand palace of Raphael Farhi, the successful banker and chief financial adviser to the Ottoman sultanate. It was Raphael and his older brother, Haim, who collected the taxes that financed the granaries, foundries and academies of Greater Syria, and it was the subterranean vaults of his palace that held the gold that backed the imperial coin. Until his family’s tragic dissolution in the mid-19th century, Raphael Farhi – known as “El Muallim,” or the teacher – was not simply the leader of Syria’s famously prominent and prosperous Jewish community; He was one of the most powerful men in the Ottoman world.

Hakam Roukbti knows this better than anyone. As the architect who has assigned himself the epic task of restoring Beit Farhi to its former glory, he has been working with a full complement of ghosts – Raphael, his brothers and their extended families, the palace guests and servants – peering over his shoulder. “The Farhis controlled all the finances in Greater Syria,” says Roukbti. “He was paying the pashas’ salaries. He appointed governors. This house was the most important of all the houses in Damascus.”

Roukbti, a Syrian who left for Spain in 1966 to study Islamic art, and his wife, Shirley Dijksma, have devoted themselves to the faithful renovation of the massive and labyrinthian Beit Farhi -- from the Hebrew language inscriptions carved in the reception hall to the orange trees in the courtyards. Their goal is to complete the work this summer and launch it as a luxury boutique hotel not long after that.

It is all part of a wider renaissance in one of the longest-inhabited cities in the world. While an economic boom is transforming greater Damascus into a modern metropolis with five-star hotels and shopping malls, the old city is keeping true to itself. Villas and caravansary are being carefully restored and converted into restaurants, cafés, inns, and art salons. Even the usually absent municipal government is getting into the act; the citadel has been completely renovated and strips of the souk’s narrow streets have been appointed with gas lamps.

At the epicenter of this reawakening is Beit Farhi, all 25,000 square feet of it. The rooms are nearly finished, complete with spot lighting and central heating, and soon the reception hall will be sealed under a glass canopy that will protect guests from the city’s pollution and insects. (It was one concession Roukbti made to modernity.) The cellar bar, which will stretch along the entire north side of the palace, is poised to become a favored watering hole of Damascus’ well-fixed expatriates. It was dug out at a price, however; according to Dijksma, an interior designer who promotes local Syrian artists, the same laborer was bitten three times by scorpions.

But while Beit Farhi may soon be hosting international film stars and celebrity politicians in its pricey chambers, it is far more than a commercial enterprise. The Muslim Roukbti and the Christian, Dutch-born Dijksma are on a mission that is as much ecumenical as aesthetic. The Syrian Jewish population has a history, as lush and complex as Beit Farhi’s marble-inlaid floors, that begins on one end of the Mediterranean and ends on the other. For centuries, it was a vital part of the mosaic of varied religions and ethnicities that made Damascus the world’s first city of commerce and culture.

For decades, the Jewish quarter has been a mute stepchild to the perennially chaotic main souk. Emptied after the creation of Israel and the wars that followed, its apartments and stalls have been padlocked by families now living elsewhere.

Today, the remains of Syria’s Jewish community consist of about three dozen aged men and women in Damascus and even fewer in the northern city of Aleppo. Albert Cameo, a leader of Syria’s residual Jews, recalls with delight the day Roukbti introduced himself as the man who was going to save Beit Farhi. “I assumed he was crazy,” Cameo says above the din of workers sanding stone walls in preparation for painting. “But then I thought, ‘What does it matter if he can pull it off?’ And now, look at this miracle.”

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